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Club Meeting 31.10.13

I wish to thank members for letting me have their digital copy of the print submissions – Jennifer now owes me 10 pence!! Can we now treat this as the norm for future print submissions.

It is worth making time to visit the Viviane Sassen exhibition at the Portrait Gallery – it is quite an experience, especially in the way that they have staged the displays.

Anita is having an exhibition at Fenton Barns – 8/9/10th Nov ., please try to visit. Full details on notice board.

We will be visiting Kirkcaldy Camera Club on Monday 11th Nov., put your name on the list on the notice board then we can organise car sharing.

There is also a further list in respect of our Christmas Dinner on Thursday 19th Dec. please put your name on the list, there is a copy of details on the notice board.

Last night we had Horst Meyerdieks to enlighten us on the art of Astrophotography, he is a member of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh and also a member of the staff of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.

He has had a lifelong interest in amateur astronomy and has been working in the field of astrophotography since 1999, when he replaced his telescope eyepiece with a digital camera. He has a web site www.chiandh.me.uk which you might like to look at.

We were given an insight into the equipment that he has developed in order to capture images that we would not know were there with the naked eye. It does take a lot of dedication but by using a SLR on a tripod and keeping the shutter open from 30 seconds to a few minutes on a clear night it can produce some interesting results.

So get away from street lighting, wrap up warm and have a go.

Next week we will have our Colour Print entries judged (or taken apart!) by George Neilson. I am sure he will give us his opinion and guidance that if we take on board it will help us to develop our skills further.

Please note we will be expecting your entries for the ‘Human Portrait Competition’ on 21st Nov. This time will wish to receive up to three printed mounted images, so please start to prepare so that we have a high number of entries.

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If anyone is interested in photographing aurorae, you can check http://www.spaceweather.com/ for the latest news. You can also sign up for alerts by email or SMS. You can also browse the site for photographs taken from around the world. NASA also send out regular news about “what’s up there” – you can sign up for their email alerts at http://science.nasa.gov/about-us/email-updates/.

Horst mentioned using special software to remove the sky background from photographs of the night sky. A common way to do this is to remove the star images using a median filter, fit a surface to what’s left and then subtract that surface. You can emulate this technique in Photoshop with the following steps:

1) Make a duplicate copy of the layer containing the night sky image (control/J).
2) Blur the duplicate layer using a median filter (found under the Filter/Noise menu). Use a large radius so all the stars and interesting objects disappear. The larger the radius, the more detail you’ll keep.
3) The median filter might generate some noticable edges. You can smooth these out by blurring the layer again with a Gaussian blur (from the Filter/Blur menu). Again, a large radius is better. You want all the artifacts removed.
4) Finally, set the blend mode of the duplicate layer to “Difference”. The result should be a nice sky image with a flat, dark background.

The same technique works for photographs of text on dirty paper, except you’ll need to invert the image after doing the difference.